This week we Lectio the Liturgy with the Collect for the Feast of Pentecost.
Almighty ever-living God, who willed the Paschal Mystery to be encompassed as a sign in fifty days, grant that from out of the scattered nations the confusion of many tongues may be gathered by heavenly grace into one great confession of your name. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.
If the disciples were counting days, they may have had some idea that on that day, the day the Holy Spirit came upon them, something big was going to happen.
In scripture, the number 40 is a common number for great events, such as the 40 years the Israelites wandered through the wilderness. Jesus was tempted in the dessert for 40 days and 40 days after the Resurrection, Jesus told the disciples to go to Jerusalem and pray just before He ascended into heaven.
In scripture, the number 10 symbolizes divine perfection, completeness of order, or authority. Examples include the Ten Commandments. the Ten Plagues of Egypt, and the principle of tithing 10% back to God.
The sum of these two events, the 40 days plus 10, gives us the fifty days between Easter and Pentecost. Fifty is also the number of days between the Jewish Passover and the Feast of Weeks, which commemorates the date when God gave the Torah to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai. The Feast of Weeks is why there was a great number of people from “scattered nations” in Jerusalem that day, the fiftieth day after Easter.
We learn about these “scattered nations” in the first reading of the Vigil of Pentecost. This scripture passage from Genesis 11 is about the Tower of Babal. The people of Babal all spoke the same language and apparently they all got along quite well. To make a name for themselves, and to keep form being scattered all over the earth, they decided to build themselves a city with a tower that would reach to the sky.
God noticed. His remedy was to confuse their language so they couldn’t understand each other, and they became the “scattered nations” with a “confusion of many tongues.”
The events of Babel and Pentecost intersect in a couple interesting ways. First, the people of Babal decided to do something great without God. At Pentecost, the Christians proclaimed God’s might works. Second, at Babal, what began as one language became many. However, at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit allowed many languages to understand what the disciples were preaching when they proclaimed God’s name.
Our petition of this prayer is that we, all of us, in our homes, parishes and scattered around the word, every nation and every language, confess, or acknowledge, HIs name. Think about that for a minute. What would it look like to have everyone confess God’s name? All of us would acknowledge and proclaim Him as God because to confess His name means that we surrender to His power over us.
Perhaps our voices are all it would take to spark a new fire of the Holy Spirit. In the second chapter of Acts we read Peter’s words to the crowds and we learn that over 3,000 were baptized that day.
Every Pentecost we pray for a new outpouring of the Spirit, but what good will it do if we don’t confess and proclaim what He’s done for us? Perhaps it’s time for us to not just pray it but to say it.